Deep Utopia

A greyhound catching the mechanical lure—what would he actually do with it? Has he given this any thought? Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies changed the global conversation on AI and became a New York Times bestseller. It focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong. But what if things go right? Suppose that we develop superintelligence safely, govern it well, and make good use of the cornucopian wealth and near magical technological powers that this technology can unlock. If this transition to the machine intelligence era goes well, human labor becomes obsolete. We would thus enter a condition of "post-instrumentality", in which our efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. Furthermore, at technological maturity, human nature becomes entirely malleable. Here we confront a challenge that is not technological but philosophical and spiritual. In such a solved world, what is the point of human existence? What gives meaning to life? What do we do all day? Deep Utopia shines new light on these old questions, and gives us glimpses of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future. Deep Utopia is a hybrid literary-philosophical work. A few friends attend a week-long lecture series, delivered by a fictionalized version of Professor Bostrom. The proceedings however are interrupted by questions from the audience, jokes, and satirical events. After the lectures, the friends discuss, critique, and sometimes make fun of what they’ve heard. They also run into other characters (some real and some imaginary) who bring additional views into play. Later, the friends turn to the Professor’s assigned readings, which are fiction stories elucidating key themes that are covered more abstractly in the lectures. The three structural elements—the lectures, the conversations/action sequences, and the assigned stories—support one another to form a carefully architected whole. They let the reader view the core ideas of the book from multiple perspectives. But the playful format has a function beyond the pedagogical: it also expresses and (as it were) manifests the subject matter of the work. The fictional week of intellectual exploration and fun can itself be seen as a fragment of utopia—a little glimmer, or augury, of the unfathomably vast and wonderful possibilities opened up to humanity at the point of technological maturity.